Food, fitness, books, life

March 29, 2015March 29, 2015

My week in training…

This week I have exercised 5 days out of 7. I had my first two personal training sessions with Ally at Absolute Health and I loved it! The first session he went pretty easy on me, after all, he didn’t know my capabilities so didn’t want to push me too far and cause me an injury. My second session was a little harder (have you ever done this), but it’s nice to be pushed and learn new things that will help me achieve my goals.

On Wednesday my flatmate and I did some hill training. We ran to the hill (it was about 1km from our flat) and set a timer for 15 minutes. We ran up the hill, walked back down and then repeated. We didn’t stop until the 15 minutes were up. That was 7 repeats and it hurt. Seriously, I don’t think the picture really does it justice! The first half of the hill wasn’t too bad, but as the street gets narrower the gradient increases and for some reason at that point becomes a wind tunnel! Anyway, 7 times is our record, so next week when we go back to do it again we’ll aim for 8. Yeah, it hurts, but hills are great for building up strength and stamina. AND, if I ever come up against a hill in a race it’ll be a breeze ‘cause I guarantee it won’t be as hard as this hill!! By the time we finished we decided we should do a quick run around the downs to add on a little bit of distance. By the time we finished my MapMyRun told me we’d done 4.3km, which isn’t too bad, I think!

Hill training

I also managed to do two 10k runs this week, too. The first was with my friend Fliss; we hadn’t seen each other for a while so we had a slow 10k while catching up. At about 7km we came across a really steep and long hill. Now, one or the other I’d maybe be okay with, but both? So, in an effort not to be defeated we decided to do it in intervals; run 20 paces, walk 20 paces. We didn’t make it all the way to the top. We had to do some walking (beyond our 20 paces…) All in all I was quite happy with the pace, it was the first 10k I’d done in a while and we were talking all the way round!

My second 10k of the week was yesterday with my flatmate and we did it in 58 minutes! I was pretty chuffed with that because when we did the route before we did it in 1hr so we shaved at least two minutes from our time! It’s a pretty flat route (okay, no up hills, but one really big downhill which probably helped our time!) The first few kilometres were roughly 5mins 30 per km, which is really fast for me! By the time we got to the last three kilometres I decided to slow down a bit to make sure I’d get to the end. There was a girl running in front of me and she had quite a nice slow pace so I decided to run in time with her (in a stalker-like manner 3 metres behind), but when my mind started to wonder I started to creep closer to her… I think my pace must be naturally getting faster and now I’m really confused about how to pace myself for the Bristol 10k. Has anyone else had this problem?

Sunday’s 10k

So this week, 3 cardio sessions and two weight session, if I can keep this up then I should be well on my way to a 55 minute 10k in May. Whatever time I get in that race will dictate what I am aiming for in the half marathon…